AIDS and global health activists are calling on the US Senate leadership to urgently approve a record five-year, $50-billion bill to fight AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis primarily in Africa so that President George W. Bush can take it with him when he meets with other western leaders at next month’s Group of Eight (G-8) summit in Japan. The activists believe that Congressional approval of the package will give Bush greater leverage in persuading his counterparts from Europe and Japan to commit substantially more of their own money to the same cause.

The bill, an extension of Bush’s own five-year, $15-billion President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), enjoys strong bipartisan support. But it is opposed in its present form by a handful of right-wing Republican lawmakers. The group’s leader, Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, has demanded that the bill require that at least 55% of the money be spent on the treatment of AIDS victims, a demand that proponents of the bill insist would deny local authorities the flexibility they need to decide what strategies, including prevention, would be most effective to fight spread of the disease.

But the same group of senators has also said they object to the total amount of the bill, the fact that $10 billion of the total would be routed through the multilateral Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria over which Washington exercises less control, and that its provisions would support or permit “morally questionable activities”, such as needle distribution to drug users. The bill represents “the height of irresponsibility in the middle of a war and surging debts,” according to Sen. Jim DeMint, one of seven signatories of a letter sent in April to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell objecting to the bill. The bill, however, is supported both by Bush himself and by the two major presumptive presidential candidates in the November elections, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, who co-sponsored the legislation, and his Republican foe, Sen. John McCain.

“Negotiations are underway now,” according to Paul Zeitz, who directs the Global AIDS Alliance (GAA), a strong supporter of the bill, who added that McCain could play a key role in breaking the impasse. “It’s in the interests of the US and the Democratic Congress that Bush go to the G-8 with this legislation in hand.”

PEPFAR, which Bush announced on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, has been widely recognised as perhaps the most successful and least controversial foreign policy initiative of his presidency, both because of the bipartisan support that it has enjoyed and because of the unprecedented magnitude of funding it has provided to the fight against infectious diseases that continue to kill millions of people each year, particularly in Africa.

Among other achievements, the programme is estimated to have provided treatment for approximately two million people, prevented some seven million new infections, and provided care to another 10 million people, including several million AIDS orphans. “Passing this bill will be a signal to the (G-8) countries that the US is fully committed and that they should also move forward boldly with their own commitments,” said Joanne Carter, associate executive director of RESULTS, a development group here. — IPS